Hi! My name is Ioko Tsuda (@ioko), and I work at Mercari on our Corporate PR Team.

As a member of Corporate PR, I’m currently working on promoting and planning our messaging around topics like the circular economy and our global expansion. Our goal is to increase the number of people who share Mercari’s beliefs and with whom our mission resonates. My hobby is jazz dance, which I’ve continued since I was in elementary school. After the birth of my first child, I returned to the stage, but since my second child, I’ve been taking a break. Honestly, I can’t imagine a life without dancing.

Ever since I joined Mercari, I have consistently been involved in Corporate PR, and have so far been in charge of the messaging of a variety of topics including interviews with our leadership, financial results, sustainability, and HR-related matters.

Being entrusted with a large assignment immediately after joining the company gave me a real sense of fulfillment

To start, I’d like to talk about the impression that my first assignment after joining the company left on me.

I joined Mercari on May 1, 2018, right in the middle of the Golden Week holidays, so I didn’t have my first day at the office until May 7. On May 14, just one week after I first stepped into the office, the company received approval to go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Index (press release available only in Japanese), which wrote a major moment in the company’s history. The day the company received new listing approval I was also put in charge of taking calls from the media, so I first had to digest the contents of a gigantic FAQ document, and then I got to the task of answering phones that never seemed to stop ringing. I was incredibly nervous, but it turned out to be a great experience and allowed me to quickly get up to speed on the company. In addition, around the time that the company was listed, I was also in charge of handling the deluge of interview requests for Shintaro (Shintaro Yamada: Mercari Group Director, Representative Executive Officer and CEO”) and Fumiaki (Fumiaki Koizumi: Mercari Group Director and President). Being entrusted with a large assignment immediately after joining the company gave me a real sense of fulfillment.

One other memory that really stayed with me is from October 2018, when we had a large number of non-Japanese new graduates join the company, which we publicized massively for news coverage.

Today Mercari is home to members from about 50 different countries and territories. Roughly half of our engineering organization is made up of non-Japanese nationals, creating a highly diverse organization. However, in 2018, only 10% of Mercari Japan’s members were non-Japanese (from about 30 different countries), so the addition of all these new graduates caused the company’s diversity to suddenly skyrocket.

Among all of the requests we sent out for news coverage, one that stands out for me is a project that I started working on in the summer of 2018. I was in charge of creating a piece for broadcast on a documentary program, and I managed to get time on “BS Special,” a program produced by public broadcaster NHK. I joined the company in May, and two months later in July, I had already started discussing plans for the piece, which was completed and aired in April 2019. The most memorable part of this experience was the filming of our new graduate recruitment in India in December. What I personally found rewarding was that it was my first time working on a piece for a documentary and my first overseas business trip, and that I was the sole member of PR sent to India.

The documentary included footage of new graduate job interviews that we shot, and so we had to be careful about handling sensitive information. Despite receiving advance approval from schools, we still faced some difficulties like having to renegotiate with schools once we were in India. However, I got a real sense of accomplishment from overcoming the difficulties we faced to produce the coverage that we did.

I’ve written about this in a past Mercan article, but new graduate recruitment for the Indian Institutes of Technology is very unique. Companies that apply to come to campus flood the interview space that the institute provides. Interviews start at 4:00 AM and run until 2:00 AM the next day! The whole scene was a massive departure from new graduate interviews in Japan and left a huge impression on me.

As an aside, I’ll mention that there were no places to stay near the campus. To get to the institute we drove from our hotel for about three and a half hours (weaving around a line of cows at one point). The camera was rolling the whole time we were in the car.

The ESG initiatives vital to achieving our mission

I became interested in Mercari when I heard about the problem of users listing cash. At my previous job I was in charge of public relations, so I used to check many different newspapers in the morning, and I remember the critical tone the media reports had when covering Mercari.

At the time, even though I knew about Mercari, I didn’t really know what kind of company it was, but I was curious. When I started looking into the company, I found a story about how when company CEO Shintaro traveled around the world and visited developing nations, he saw how difficult it would be for everyone there to live like people in developed countries on account of the earth’s limited resources. However, he had a thought that it would be possible to seamlessly circulate the earth’s resources through the power of technology, and thus arrived at the idea of creating Mercari.

I was shocked by the disconnect between the tone of the media coverage and Mercari’s founding mission, and I had this sense that a company with this kind of mission deserved people’s support. I thought that maybe if I worked on the company’s image as a PR person, there might be something I could do to change people’s perception. That is ultimately what led me to aspire to join the company. After I actually joined Mercari and told friends and acquaintances the story of how it came to be, or about the company’s relationship with sustainability, most people said they’d had no idea. Right around that time a lot of people started using Mercari, and the service became recognized as a household marketplace in Japan. I get a real sense that empathy for the worldview that we are aiming for is spreading, so I really want more people to get to know Mercari.

I personally have been interested in the idea of solving social issues through business ventures since I was a student. At grad school, I did research on the realization of Creating Shared Value (CSV). Even as a child I’d had an inkling that I wanted to have a job that would be useful to others. Making donations and doing volunteer work were both familiar to me, but whether you’re an individual or a company, time and money are limited, and if you lose the capacity to continue your work, that’s the end of it; working that way did not feel sustainable to me. With the concept of CSV, I started to think regularly about how I wanted to contribute to a sustainable society through business.

In that sense, the one thing I’ve always wanted to work on since the time I joined the company is sustainability. When I joined Mercari, there was no CSR Team. The company’s work on CSR was summarized in a few words on our corporate website, and that was the extent of things.

However, it became clear that sustainability would become more and more important in order to realize the mission Mercari is aiming for. This is why we launched a full Sustainability section on our corporate website, and which I was in charge of. In 2019, I was also in charge of public relations for the “Mercari Eco Pack,” which we released to coincide with World Environment Day.

Created as a step toward realizing a circular economy, the Mercari Eco Pack is a form of reusable packaging material that was developed over a long period of time and with various teams. There was actually a Mercan article published that talks about our journey to develop this product. If you’re interested in reading more, check it out.

Additionally, in an effort to spread knowledge of the Mercari Eco Pack even further, we collaborated with the magazine FRaU to include our product as an insert in their publication. After I finished my master’s program, I remained active in the sustainability field, and I participated in a lot of meetups of people involved in sustainability. This is where I spoke with the editor of FRaU and where our collaboration with the magazine started.

It was a rare and precious experience to be involved in launching our sustainability webpage and in promoting the Mercari Eco Pack, which was our first ever ESG initiative, just as ESG was drawing more attention around the world.

I want to increase the ranks of like-minded people aiming to create a circular economy

Since I joined Mercari, I’ve taken childbirth and childcare leave twice, so I’ve had the experience of joining the company three times. Each time I take leave, I always find myself feeling grateful that I work for Mercari. There are several reasons.

We have been unwavering in our mission to operate a service that is used around the world and to create a circular economy, and at work I am surrounded by colleagues who share my beliefs in this idea.

Each time I attend a media event with our leadership, I also find myself reaffirming how much I love Mercari, the company that our founder Shintaro Yamada built. Mercari is also a listed company, so to people outside the company, we probably look less like a startup and more like a major corporation. But honestly, we’re still only part of the way to realizing our mission, and I feel that our collective passion is going to make it happen.

In my position as a PR rep, I want to keep coming up with ways to convey our mission more widely and to get more people to support us. Moreover, I also want to think of how to increase the ranks of people (and I don’t just mean Mercari employees, but also our external partners) aiming in earnest to achieve our mission of creating a circular economy.